Mark Boen says CSA members want three things: choice, convenience, and connection to the farm.Which is why he’s moving away from CSA as a way to market his produce.The choice, convenience, connection trio of the CSA is similar to the contractor’s trio of fast, cheap, and good. Everybody wants all three, but you only get two at most.It’s your job to decide which ones you’re going to promise. Making the right promise will be key to retaining members.

Your own marketing sweet spot happens at the intersection of your capabilities and the needs, wants, and desires of your customers – and where that intersection doesn’t intersect is with what your competition provides.

Your capabilities are those things that you are able to do, and include products and services with different definitions of quality at different value points. For example, your capabilities might include producing inexpensive tomatoes and delivering them fresh to your customer’s doorstep; or, it might be producing the most beautiful, high-priced tomatoes in sufficient quantity to effectively distribute them through a wholesale distributor or food hub.

The needs, wants, and desires of your customers include everything from “I’m hungry” to a desire to feel like they are part of a community. In many marketplaces, customers exist on multiple levels: you might be selling to a grocery store, where you need to meet the needs of the produce buyer; but you also need to meet the needs of her customer, the one actually picking your produce up off the shelf.

Customers at the grocery store, for example, wanted our skinless, seedless cucumbers – the ones that you grow in the greenhouse and can charge a million dollars for. But the produce buyer at the store needed cucumbers that could last on the shelf for a long time. Since those skinless cucumbers wilt if you look at them funny, that meant that we needed to wrap them in shrink wrap to be able to sell them in the wholesale marketplace.

My mom, for example, wants salad mix in containers (she justifiably feels that bulk salad greens are subject to sneezes and other undesirable occurrences). The produce buyer at her store needs consistent deliveries of salad greens in well-labeled boxes with clear invoicing. Be certain that you are providing what the end consumer wants, as well as what the middleman needs.

Your competition includes those people and companies providing similar products and services in your marketplace. Your job is to provide goods and services that differ from theirs, in quality, price, and other expressions of value. If somebody’s already providing radicchio to stores in your area, why go there – unless your radicchio has some distinguishing qualities. Can you deliver more often? Is yours certified organic while theirs isn’t? Does yours have a significantly longer shelf-life? Can you grow and sell it at rock-bottom prices? (Please don’t do that last one.)

Competition happens at all different levels. The radicchio you sell to stores in your area is in competition with the radicchio from other local growers, as well as the radicchio being sold from national distributors.

Of course, your customer has to value your differentiation from the competition for it to do you any good. When I started Rock Spring Farm, we made bunched parsley available to the local food co-op. But the local food co-op was perfectly happy to buy parsley in bulk from another local grower and put the twist ties on themselves. While it seemed crazy to me, my capabilities (providing bunched parsley) didn’t match up with the needs, wants, and desires of my customer – the fact that I was doing something that my competition wouldn’t simply didn’t matter in this case.

Word of Thanks

Yes, this newsletter is coming out on Thanksgiving (at least here in the states!), but it’s also kind of a cool day from a measurements standpoint.

Sometime this morning, the Farmer to Farmer Podcast will go past 100,000 downloads. And last week, this newsletter shot past 800 subscribers - most of whom actually open and read it every week!

It’s pretty easy, talking into my microphone and typing away at my keyboard, to feel sort of isolated. It’s hard to know if anybody’s listening - and that means it’s hard to know if this is making a difference.

Thank you. Thank you for being there. Thank you for sharing the newsletter and the podcast, and thank you for letting me know that it matters. Most of all, thank you for doing what you do every day: getting up and moving your farm, or your boss’s farm, or your farming dream, forward. A little bit better every day.

About a month ago, I packed up Purple Pitchfork (and everything else in my life) and moved to Madison, Wisconsin. This Saturday, my partner and I finally made it to the farmers’ market on the capitol square - that’s the famous one here, and the largest in the country. It was a nice day, and we got some great eats, but I was surprised to see how many of the farmers simply didn’t stand out. There was a lot of beautiful produce - it’s clearly a good year for beets - and some unique items, but I was surprised at how few of the vegetable stands really set themselves apart from the sea of vendors.

On the other hand, the vegetable stands that stood out were largely the growers who have been at the market for decades.

When I go into Whole Foods or HyVee, I rarely see un-branded produce from national and international vendors - almost everything has a company name on the twist-tie, bag, or sticker. Sales are based largely on emotion, and brand identification creates a level of comfort for the customer - whether they are buying from a local farmer or an international powerhouse.

As local vendors, we should be capitalizing on the desire of our customers for connection and the corresponding comfort it brings by making ourselves and our products stand out, whether it’s at the grocery store or the farmers’ market. A beautiful display works for making the first sale, but it doesn’t help people find you the next week.

Even for a national brand like Bunny Luv carrots, the brand marker makes the product a known quantity. You want to be a known quantity as well. Your name and location provide a mental “hook” for your customers. That hook may allow them to feel comfortable with you as a person (“I know something about this person”), provide a conversation starter (“How far is it from Viroqua?”), or give them something to talk about when they get home (“This lettuce is from Rock Spring Farm”). It also provides a reference point that they can return to, or that they can refer friends and colleagues to.

Farmers’ market signage doesn’t have to be fancy, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot. For years, our farm identification at farmers market was written on a chalkboard with chalkboard markers. It was a simple, inexpensive, and flexible way to say who we were, and hung readily from our market canopy.

While some people identified my farm by name, I was always surprised at the number of people who didn’t know it, even after we added it to our awning and refrigerated truck. But everybody readily recognized two things about our stand: my hat (a vaguely Crocodile Dundee-style hat that I reserved for farmers market) and our homemade cedar display boxes. Very rarely did anybody come looking for Rock Spring Farm carrots in our early years, but they did come looking for “the carrots from the man in the hat.”

Other examples of market branding that I’ve seen over the years include:

Have everybody at your stand wear the same shirt. At Harmony Valley Farm’s market stand, each member of their staff was wearing a bright red shirt with the farm name and logo. Aprons work for this as well, and provide a little more flexibility.

Color-coordinate your stand. At Luna Circle Farm’s market stand, the awning and table cloth are purple (and it’s been that way for 20 years).

A frame around the stand that always has something hanging from it, whether it’s pepper ristras or garlic braids.

Hats are always popular, whether they are crazy (like the guy at Marsden’s Pure Honey, who wears a bee-hive on his head) or just distinctive.

(By the way, branding doesn’t have to be a look. If you’ve ever been to Pike’s Place Market in Seattle, you probably know the guys who throw the fish around - but you probably don’t know the name of their business.)

Most importantly, find a consistent way to make you and your market stand stand out, week after week.

If you decide that you want to lower your selling price, you need to get something substantial for that. Lower prices should only be a reward for the customer who helps you drive down your acquisition costs, increase your utilization, or sell a lot more product.

CSA farmers often provide a discount for early purchases, and I've seen this more and more with the "market CSA" model where customers get a punch card to shop at a farmers market stand. Before you do this, you have to ask: does getting money up front reduce my overall expenses? Can I "borrow" the money from my customers for less than I could borrow it from the bank?

In that same model, you would also want to ask if providing a discount at your stand helps you to make better use of your fields or your product selection? One of the curses and advantages of farming for a CSA is the requirement to grow a lot of different crops - it's hard, but it also means you have the opportunity to get increased value on low-value crops by including them in the same box; for example, we used to include greenhouse greens in a box of winter roots, effectively increasing the value of the turnips by packaging them with the fresh greens.

Finally, does providing a punch card help you sell more product - and does it help you sell enough more product to offset the lost profits from the discounted produce? If you are making a 30% margin on your crops, and you give your customers a 10% discount, you are cutting your profits by a third.

The same questions apply to dropping prices in any situation. Does decreasing your price allow you to sell a lot more product - like moving pallets of broccoli to a wholesale distributor? Does it drive down your costs - like saving the time and expense of going to farmers market? Does it get you needed cash flow to pay staff until you get to a more profitable crop? (Are you sure?) Does it help you put together a load that includes high-margin crops?

Never lower your prices for the sole purpose of selling products - sales without profit is just work.

The price that a customer is willing to pay has everything to do with how much value they ascribe to your product.It has nothing to do with your cost of production and marketing.The cost of production and marketing determines how much you have to charge for your product in order to not lose money, or in order to make a certain margin or realize certain returns from your business.But it has nothing to do with the price a customer is willing to pay.Unless, that is, you decide to make the production and marketing part of the story that adds value to the product you are selling. The fact that it costs more isn’t interesting, and isn’t likely to add value to your product. The story of why is interesting, if you make it so.

When customers complain, it can feel like a blow to the gut. You’ve put your heart and soul into growing and delivering your crops, and after that kind of effort, rejection really hurts.But complaints result from one of two things: either you’ve got a problem with your product, or you’ve got a problem with your customers.If customers complain about the quality of the product they get from you, you need to determine why they’ve gotten low quality produce from you. Did you pack rotten vegetables in their boxes? Do you lack the cooling capacity or procedures to get product cold fast, reducing respiration and increasing shelf life? Do you understand the commercial requirements for the product you are selling? Do you need to up your disease-control and insect-control game, or make changes to your soil management practices? Do you have what you need to maintain the cold chain – or at least a semblance of a cold chain – from the time your product leaves the farm to the time the customer takes control of it?Or does the problem lie on their end? Did your farmers market customer leave their salad mix in a hot car for hours before it found its way to their refrigerator? Does your wholesale buyer adequately manage their stock rotation? At Rock Spring Farm, I offered a no-questions-asked refund or replacement the first time a customer complained about quality issues; but if customer-specific quality issues arose again, I turned into a detective to figure out the source of the problem.If customers complain about prices, either you aren’t providing the value they expect, or you’ve got the wrong customers. Value – what a bundle of goods and services is worth to a customer – has little or no relationship to your particular cost of production; it’s a function of customer perception. You need customers who value local, organic, family-farmed vegetables (if that’s what you’re offering), and you need to provide them with a quantity and quality that matches what they expect. No small feat!

The price you need for your products is based on your cost of production and marketing. But the price you get for your product comes down to value.And value is subjective. In my first year at Rock Spring Farm, I couldn’t get $1.00 per pound for our tomatoes at the Decorah, Iowa, farmers market – but I could sell exactly the same tomatoes for $2.50 a pound in Rochester, Minnesota! The same tomato, sold in the same way, had much more value for my Rochester customers. Guess where I sold my tomatoes?I also found that I could sell my salad mix at a higher price than my competitors in Rochester. Why? Because it looked better in the bag and lasted longer in the refrigerator than the other salad greens at the market. We consistently nailed the production on salad greens, and followed it up with great post-harvest handling. Same market, same crop, but with a significantly higher value.If you aren’t getting the price you need for your products, you’ve got four choices:

Reduce your cost of production, marketing, and distribution, so that you can charge a lower price for your current value proposition;

Decrease your value proposition;

Increase your value proposition; or

Find new customers.

To make money farming, you absolutely must match your value proposition to your customers.

In marketing, it pays to match the range of products and services you offer to the breadth of the market you offer them to.Think about a triangle, with the point at the top. The point represents a narrow range of products and services, while the base of the triangle represents a very broad market – that’s how a company like Grimmway (the giant carrot producer) sells carrots: they’ve got a very narrow product offering (carrots), and they market them to everybody possible.If you broaden out the product and service offerings (the point of the triangle) while keeping the market (the base of the triangle) the same, you end up with a square – a broad range of products marketing to a very broad marketplace. An extreme example would be growing everything from radicchio to Burbank Russet baking potatoes, and selling the whole lot to everyone from urban foodies to Iowa corn growers.

When you market with a square, it’s just plain hard to stand out from the crowd. Because the definition of value and quality varies with different segments of the market, it’s almost impossible to provide a wide range of products that is perceived as high value to a broad marketplace – so you end up competing on the basis of price, instead.And that’s not sustainable.

Now, invert that triangle so that you’ve got a very broad range of products and services, but you’re marketing to a very narrow market. Most farmers in the organic and local food movements are already doing this to some extent by marketing to customers with an elevated commitment to those values. But too many small growers continue to try to be everything to everybody who might be interested in the product categories they have to offer.You need diversity, but too much diversity at both the top and the bottom of the triangle becomes too difficult to manage effectively. Think about how to narrow the bottom of that inverted triangle: instead of marketing CSA shares to an entire city, what about marketing to a select neighborhood, or to a select self-identified community? Instead of marketing through a CSA, wholesale, and farmers market, what about picking one segment, and doing it really well?

The transition from July to August isn’t easy. It’s hot, the battle with the weeds isn’t getting any easier, and you’ve still got to get the turnips planted.But that’s your problem, not your customer’s.When you’re greeting a customer at farmers market, or writing a newsletter for your CSA, or engaging with your employees, don’t forget to smile. It’s a good life, people, and we’re all lucky to be here. Smiling reminds you, and everyone around you, that that’s true.

The basket of goods and services you provide to your customers has more in it than the explicit stuff. It’s not just the vegetables and the delivery and the newsletter - it’s the box you put the produce in, the label you put on the box, the invoicing system you use, and more.People who buy your fruits and vegetables aren’t just buying produce and a newsletter, they’re buying everything that goes into buying that produce, from the way you present it to the story you tell about why and how you got into farming. Farmers market customers are buying clean and fresh farmers in addition to clean and fresh vegetables, and wholesale buyers buy a communication and delivery schedule in addition to their produce.You can one-up the competition by doing exceptionally well at adding real value with service and consistency where your customers don’t even know that they expect it. At the wholesale level:

Verify your customers’ overdue payment status every month, and let them know about anything that’s missing - including applying a credit to an invoice.

At farmers market:

Clearly identify prices for your products where customers can easily see them (putting the price for radicchio on a chalkboard behind the stand does not make it easy for customers to identify the vegetable or its price);

Be prepared with at least one “week-night” preparation for every product on your stand, and make sure your helpers have the same knowledge;

For a CSA:

Provide a straightforward sign-up process (this doesn’t have to be an online shopping cart - Fair Share Farm in Missouri requires members to come to a sign-up event - the process just needs to be linear and clear in its description of options and process.

Let members know what to expect in their share before you deliver it - at the same time every week;

Make box return easy by providing instructions for unfolding boxes;

At delivery sites, keep the boxes off of the ground to keep them clean and sanitary.

You’re always selling more than what you’re selling, and the extras are part of the price that your customer pays for their produce.

You know that guy at farmer's market who sits on the tailgate of his pickup truck, looking down at the ground with his arms crossed? How much effort are you going to put into going up to him and buying his vegetables?Nobody's obligated to buy from you. Wal-Mart has organic and local produce now. Yes, you work hard. Yes, you take good care of the earth. Yes, you suffer through droughts and floods and plagues of locusts, but that just doesn't matter. Your competition isn't asking for a break, and that means your customers aren't going to give you one.I try to patronize local businesses, but I'm often greeted with an attitude that makes me wonder why anybody would shop there - the appliance store that charges an extra trip charge because their repair guy didn't bring the right parts, the clothing store staffed by young women who can't be bothered to talk to me, the Mexican restaurant that can't be bothered to bring a margarita in under fifteen minutes. These people are coasting, and coasting doesn't work forever (even if you keep going downhill, you eventually run into the ocean).The small farmer needs products that have real value. Local and organic don't make up for salad greens that go bad in just a few days, dirty carrots, or bruised tomatoes. If you aren't providing fresh, flavorful, beautiful vegetables that actually last in the customer's refrigerator, you're coasting. And when things get tough - when produce departments change hands, or wallets tighten in a downturn - the customer is going to pick a produce supplier who's pedaling. And if not that, they'll just pick somebody cheaper.

In the CSA community and online, much has been made of the growth of box plans that resemble traditional Community Supported Agriculture programs in packaging and marketing, but don’t provide the same retail-level pricing and community support that formed the core of the original CSA concept.To me, this all comes down to a marketing issue. In favor of a short acronym, we’ve all dropped the Community and Supported aspects of the concept from the every-day language we use to describe this way of marketing vegetables, with the result that CSA has (in the same way that Kleenex now means anything you use to blow your nose) come to imply any delivery of vegetables in a box.CSA needs a new name. Or maybe it’s an old name that harkens back to some of the original writings on the subject of Community Supported Agriculture, such as Trauger Groh’s Farms of Tomorrow. In any case, it needs to be short and snappy, and it needs to say something about those two core values of community and support.The new name, and indeed the movement as a whole, will need to find a way to draw the line of who is in and who is out – the lines aren’t as clear as you might think. At one end of the spectrum you’ve got programs that never reference the term CSA and make no representation about actually producing the food, such as Chicagoland’s Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks, and farm-based companies like the Pacific Northwest’s Full Circle that have added on to their own production to such a degree that the farm’s own produce doesn’t represent the cornerstone of their distribution program any more.

But you also have farms that supplement their own production from area growers, as well as others that offer add-on programs to supply out-of-region items like fruits and coffee to their members. For some of these farms, the add-on items include an implicit connection to a social-justice movement or even directly to the producer; for others, it’s just a box of good fruit.The organic movement went through this definition process about 30 years ago, when organic certification began to define who was and who wasn’t organic long before the government got involved. I think it’s time for Community Supported Agriculture to do the same.